


Porch Swing

by Celia_and



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Mob, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Bathing, But it has about as happy an ending as it’s feasible for this fic to have, Contemplated Arson, Depression, Dominant Rey, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fear of Death, Gun Violence, Hallucinations, Hand Jobs, I’m not going to lie: this deals with some pretty dark things, Mental Health Issues, Mob Boss Snoke, Murder, One Shot, Police, Reference to Contemplated Suicide, Smut, Uncircumcised Penis, Witness Protection, criminal organization, threat of death, witnessing a murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:01:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26118445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celia_and/pseuds/Celia_and
Summary: It’s the middle of the afternoon. A sunny day, a perfectly public place. That’s how brazen Snoke’s people are, because they can be. As soon as she sees the guns, she knows.You can run. You can’t hide.She closes her eyes. She tries to get ready to die.----------When Ben’s past catches up with them and they’re separated, it would be easy for Rey to give up. Except that he promised her a pink house. And a porch, with a swing.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 72
Kudos: 537
Collections: Galactic Idiots Collection, Reylo Prompt Fills (@reylo_prompts)





	Porch Swing

**Author's Note:**

> Based on [@galacticidiot's extraordinary prompt](https://twitter.com/galacticidiots/status/1292009616155582465), with some slight liberties taken:
> 
> _“We’ll paint it pink.”  
>  “Pink?”  
> “It’ll have a porch and a swing.” She kisses him. “And we’ll live happily ever after.”_
> 
> _That was five years ago. Before she left._
> 
> _Now she’s back._
> 
> _“You did it,” she whispers. “Pink.”_   
>  _He doesn’t look up. “Where have you been?”_   
>  _“Witness protection.”_
> 
> —
> 
> Moodboard by my miracle worker friend [Halle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dashalle).
> 
> NOTE: This fic is quite a bit darker than my usual work. _Please_ mind the tags and take care of yourself! 💛

“We’ll paint it pink.” She grabs the washcloth and wraps her legs tighter around his middle.

He runs his calloused hand over her shin. “Why pink?”

“Why not?” She rubs his chest with the washcloth and leans into his ear. “We can do whatever we want.”

He takes her hand and kisses it. “I want whatever you want.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” It lives forever in the back of his mind: that nagging, superstitious uncertainty.

She runs her nails along his scalp to try to scrape the fear out. “You want me to be happy. And you make me happy, Ben.” She captures his hand now, and brings it over his shoulder and kisses his palm tenderly.

“What else do you want, besides pink?”

“A porch. And a swing.”

“Then you’ll have them.”

“I know.” She does know. That’s _her_ secret fear: the unimaginable lengths to which he’d go, to give her everything.

His bathtub has known red. _These violent delights have violent ends._ A dogeared coming-of-age story written in blood.

A closed chapter, he tells her again and again, like if he tells her enough times it’ll make it true. You’re never really out, though, isn’t that what they say? You can run; you can hide. They do. They try.

He groans half in protest when her hand slides down to his flaccid cock. She strokes it awake. He doesn’t like to let himself love this as much as he does, she knows. His hardness should give her pleasure, he says. She wraps one arm tighter around his chest and pins his thighs down with her feet. She slides the hood back from the tip and strokes with an exploratory thumb. Her plaything. She runs her hand up and down for her satisfaction more than his, just for the thrill of feeling him.

She doesn’t let him finish. As a reminder: as her pleasure belongs to him, so his belongs to her. She can fuck it out of him after.

She bites the fleshy part of his shoulder. Kisses it. Whispers: _“And we’ll live happily ever after.”_

* * *

It’s the middle of the afternoon. A sunny day, a perfectly public place. That’s how brazen Snoke’s people are, because they can be. As soon as she sees the guns, she knows.

You can run. You _can’t_ hide.

She closes her eyes. She tries to get ready to die.

When the shot rings out, her body jerks. It takes her a full five seconds to realize that she wasn’t hit. Three more shots pop with cold-blooded precision. There’s a body on the ground. It’s not hers.

The shooters don’t run away. They look over at her. They grin. They salute.

Oh. She _is_ dead, just not yet.

* * *

He’s drilled her often enough on this that she thought she knew what to do. Keep her head down. Don’t lead them to the house. Get to a pay phone. Not the closest one. Call his burner. Don’t, under any circumstances, be at the scene when the cops get there.

Time melts. She’s still standing there. Haven’t her feet walked away yet? It’s been hours. There’s a lump on the ground that used to be a human. Minutes? Seconds? Sirens?

She sees the flashing lights, but it doesn’t register until she sees the first uniform.

She’s in a black and white. The pay phone goes unused. His phone doesn’t ring.

She screwed up.

* * *

She sits in a cell. _For your protection,_ they said. _I’m sorry, ma’am...dangerous organization...not safe for you to leave...material witness..._

It’s past when she said she’d home. He’ll have started worrying. He’ll have started worrying even before the appointed time. She regrets having minimized his fears. They were real after all. He’s living on borrowed time, and since she decided to be a part of him, so is she.

She wonders if her death will come in this cell or another. She’ll never be allowed to sit on a witness stand, or if she does, it’ll be as bait to draw him out, and she’d end it all herself before she lets that happen.

 _Assume everyone is one of Snoke’s people,_ he’d told her again and again. She remembers that, at least. She wonders if he’ll wear a uniform, her murderer. She wonders how close he is.

She thinks about Ben, and his arms, and their bathtub, and the brass bars of their bed.

She wonders exactly when he’ll realize that she’s dead.

* * *

She lives out the week. She expects her death to come in the lawyer’s briefcase, and in the detective’s pocket. She expects it in the purse of the social worker. Or through the driver’s seat of the uniform who moves her to a “more secure location.” _Witness protection,_ they call it. The door is locked from the outside. At least she’ll be in a house, not a cell, when she becomes a pile of flesh.

She doesn’t eat for the first few days. She tries not to drink. She’d rather a gun than poison. At least it would be fast.

She lies awake and feels her stomach churn. She lives on death row.

She never—not for one second—regrets having loved him.

* * *

Eventually her body wins the battle and she gives in and eats. It doesn’t kill her. She cleans the house from top to bottom. She reads the books on the bookcase. She wonders why she’s still alive.

He comes to her at night: not in dreams, but in the hollow blackness between awake and asleep. She smells him on her pillow, and it taunts her. She wonders if she’s going crazy. She wonders how she’d know.

They tell her it’s only until the trial: that afterwards she’ll be relocated to a whole different city. She’ll be given a new life. She can go outside, have a job, make friends. She smiles and nods and waits for them to kill her.

She wonders if he’s trying to find her. If he knows what happened or if he thinks she left him, like he always feared. She’d rather he thought she was dead than that she didn’t love him. She _yearns_ for him. She’d never really understood that word before. But now she wants and wants and _wants_ until she knows with absolute certainty that if wanting were enough to bring him to her, he’d be there.

Fearing death takes more energy than she can sustain for months. So she uses that energy to want him instead.

* * *

Maybe if he thinks she left voluntarily, he’ll find someone else. Maybe he’ll give her the pink house instead.

 _“Why pink?”_ she’ll ask.

_“Why not?”_

Maybe she’ll get the porch, too, and the swing.

Rey tries to be angry but can’t. She can’t make it feel real enough, even in her imagination—the notion that they would have met and loved and been for each other and then _not,_ enough that he could find someone else. If she dies, so will he.

She would give her life for him, though, if he could keep existing after. Isn’t that what love is? Or is that what the Snokes of the world want them to think?

* * *

The seasons are muted indoors. Somewhere, someone is raking leaves, but not Rey. The trial date is set, then pushed back. They bring her a cake for Christmas. She bitterly wonders if they know what Christmas is or if they just heard “Jesus’s birthday” and got confused.

They used to get each other presents for Christmas: she and Ben. She’d always make him promise that he’d only get her one. “I’m a grownup,” she’d say. “I don’t need enough presents to fill up underneath a tree.”

He would always agree, then get her so many presents that they spilled out onto the rug. One for every year that she had none. She would curl up on the couch and look up at him as he painstakingly shuffled from the kitchen carrying a full-to-the-brim mug of hot chocolate with mini marshmallows and wonder how this man killed people.

He never liked to have sex on Christmas. She didn’t know if it was a lingering vestige of childhood or religion or the fact that Norman Rockwell never painted a couple fucking. She’d sit on the rug in his pajamas and let him bring her gift after gift until the wrapping paper piled up in a circle around her, and then she’d make him come down on the floor so she could nap on top of him and hope he understood that it should be physically impossible to love someone as much as she loved him.

He didn’t understand, though. That’s why the fear lived in the back of his skull.

She makes herself come twice this Christmas, just to spite him. Then she cries so hard she thinks they won’t need to kill her, after all: she’ll die of this.

* * *

She lies on the bed at night and the couch during the day. Sometimes she takes the blanket off, to feel cold. To feel something.

She wonders what’s taking Snoke so long. She wishes they would just come get it over with. She wouldn’t resist.

* * *

She doesn’t understand why she gets up one day. She must be tired of waiting for death, so the only alternative is to go on living. She does a spring cleaning. It takes four days. She goes to sleep with aching muscles and a satisfied smile. She asks for strawberries and gives herself a haircut.

Hope exists, she finds to her surprise. Why it should live in this empty house she doesn’t know, but she welcomes it. As long as she’s alive and so is he, she’ll see him again. It’s an inevitability. With that porch swing and a mountain of Christmas presents or without: all that matters is him and her.

The yearning starts again, but this time with an underlying certainty that floods her heart and leaves no room for doubt. She’s not even surprised when they come tell her one night that she’s free to go. That they’re no longer proceeding with the case because the defendants are dead, and the whole criminal organization has effectively been dismantled. She’s no longer in danger.

They offer her a ride anywhere she wants to go. She doesn’t even think about caution, or a pay phone. She doesn’t consider the fact that _this_ might be her death, today. She tells them the address.

She presses her foot down on the mat in the backseat like she has the gas pedal.

She doesn’t know why she’s surprised when they pull up, but she has to sit there for a minute and take it in.

Even in the darkness, the pink glows in the streetlight. The old house, restored beyond her dreams. With scrolls and latticework, and a porch as deep as the yard allows and rocking chairs and a swing. There are window boxes of flowers on the porch railing. It all speaks of hours of labor and of love without an object.

And there, on the sidewalk at the foot of the stairs, looking up at the house: Ben.

She gets out of the car and comes to stand behind him. He doesn’t turn around. There’s a new slump to his shoulders that she doesn’t remember.

“You did it,” she whispers. “Pink.”

He doesn’t look back. “Where have you been?”

“Witness protection.”

She hears a clicking sound and looks down to find a lighter in his hand. He clicks it _open, on, shut. Open, on, shut._ It glows like a firefly in the night.

He still doesn’t turn around. Something is very wrong.

“Ben,” she says quietly. “I’m home.”

“I know.” _Open, on, shut._

“I’m here, Ben.”

_Open, on, shut._

_Open, on, shut._

_Open, on._

His voice is too even. “Thank you. You can go now.”

She smells gasoline. He raises the lighter. She realizes there’s something in his other hand: a rag in a bottle.

She steps forward, almost close enough to touch him. “Ben.”

“You can go now.”

“No, I can’t.”

He pauses, falters. “But you always go when I say you can.”

“You’ve never told me to go. And I never will.”

He brings the hand holding the bottle to wipe his forehead with his wrist. He’s muttering something that she can’t make out. She takes another step closer. _“Not real. It’s not real. It’s not her.”_

She does the only thing she can think of. She lays her hand on his back.

He jumps and whirls around, eyes wild.

“What?” he gasps. “What?” It seems the only word he can say.

She grabs the lighter from him, closes it, and throws it as far as she can into the night. “Don’t burn my house down.” Her voice is shaking.

“Rey.” He swallows. “You’re dead. You’re _dead.”_

She shakes her head. “No, Ben. I’m not.”

“Snoke said so.”

“He lied to you.”

“I killed him.” He says it bluntly.

“I know.” She’s known deep down ever since they said she was free to go.

“I killed other people, too.”

“I know.”

“I’m a monster.”

“I know you think that.”

“So why are you here?”

She glances behind him. “The porch swing.”

“What?”

She nods at the railing. “That’s why I’m here. You killed the people you thought killed me, and then you came home and you built a porch and put a swing on it. Does that sound like something a monster would do?”

His eyes drink her in, but he doesn’t speak.

“Oh,” she adds. “And because I love you.”

He throws the bottle aside. It breaks on the sidewalk, and she’s in his arms. He clings to her like she’ll leave. She clings to him like she’ll stay forever.

He carries her inside so she won’t get gasoline on her shoes. He can wash it off her porch in the morning.

They don’t sleep that night. There’s no blood left on him, but she washes him anyway. He asks her to scrub him hard, and she does. And when he’s clean she straddles his lap and looks him in the eyes and tells him what she should’ve found words for, all those Christmases. _I’ll never stop loving you. No matter what happens. There’s nothing you could ever possibly do that would make me love you less. For a hundred million years, I love you, Ben._

In all the years she’s known him, in all the years she’s loved him, she’s never seen him cry. Probably he was saving up all his tears until tonight. He _sobs._ She holds him.

They get out of the bath and dry off, and they eat and cry and get into their bed and remind each other they’re alive. The dawn finds him inside her. They look out the window at the pink latticework.

He gave her her pink. And her porch, and her swing. What was the other thing she asked for? Oh, a happily ever after.

She’s alive, and he is too. The rest will follow.


End file.
